F.H. Buckley: Canada’s system of government is looking good to Americans

Canada's system of government is looking good to Americans

In Wednesday’s edition of the National Post, we published an article by Mark D. Jarvis and Lori Turnbull — two authors of the 2012 Donner Prize-winning book Democratizing the Constitution — arguing that Canada’s system of Parliamentary government gives too much power to prime ministers. In the essay that follows, F.H. Buckley presents a rebuttal.

Before Standard and Poor’s downgraded U.S. public debt, Barack Obama mused that the American system of separation of powers might not be all that it is cracked up to be. It results in gridlock, and had raised the specter that Congress would fail to raise the debt ceiling. “We did not have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating,” Obama noted. After last August’s downgrade, the imbalance has presumably been corrected, with a downgraded fiscal system to match America’s second-rate constitutional system.

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By contrast, the Canadian system of government has never seemed more attractive, if one judges these things by their results. Notwithstanding its generous social-welfare safety net, Canada is ranked as economically more free than the United States by the conservatives at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which puts Canada in sixth, and the U.S. in 10th place, in the group’s most recent international survey. On per capita government spending, the two countries are tied, and on corporate taxes Canada is way ahead. On public debt levels, it’s no contest.

And yet, curiously, many Canadians continue to envy the American constitutional system. Granted, that made some sense in the 1830s, when an insufferable popinjay, Sir Francis Bond Head, ruled Upper Canada as lieutenant-governor and provoked a rebellion. Back then, the lieutenant-governor really was the autocrat that Mark Jarvis and Lori Turnbull take Stephen Harper to be. What Jarvis and Turnbull propose is something closer to an American-style separation of powers, in which prime ministers yield power to Parliament. The same constitutional cringe may be observed in proposals for an elected Senate.

All that is so 1787! I had thought we had moved beyond the Clear Grits, Goldwyn Smith and the sense that we had something to learn from Hamilton and Madison. The Fathers of Confederation did want a Canadian Senate, but what they didn’t want was the elected Senate with which Upper Canada had experimented in 1858.

Like the House of Lords after the 1832 Reform Act, an appointed Senate might delay, but could not block, legislation. If senators were elected, however, they would have the legitimacy to oppose the House of Commons, and that was precisely why John A. Macdonald wanted an appointed body. In the Upper Canada Confederation debates, he said, “There is no fear of a dead lock between the two houses. There is an infinitely greater chance of a dead lock between the two branches of the legislature, should the elective principle be adopted.”

Getting legislation passed or repealed in America is like waiting for three cherries to line up in a Las Vegas slot machine. Absent a supermajority in Congress to override a presidential veto, one needs the simultaneous concurrence of the president, Senate and House.

In a parliamentary system, however, one needs only one cherry. In Canada, neither the governor-general nor the senate has a veto power. All that matters is the House of Commons, dominated by the prime minister’s party.

An American separation of powers might nevertheless be thought better able to screen off bad laws, which might more easily be enacted in a parliamentary regime. The flip side is that bad laws, once enacted, can more easily be reversed when a government doesn’t face the gridlock of the separation of powers.

So which is more valuable: Pre-enactment screening or ex post reversibility? I’d suggest the latter, for one important kind of legislation: “Experience laws,” whose effects cannot be judged without the benefit of hindsight. Then, reversibility trumps ex ante screening — not that there’s much of the latter in Washington. And when you get down to it, just about all laws are experience laws.

As for the charge of autocracy, Jarvis and Turnbull fail to appreciate just how accountable prime ministers are. In good times, they lord over their party, but they can be removed when they are a drag on it, as happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and Jean Chrétien in 2003. When a leader has adopted unpopular measures (think the Iraq War in 2006, or Obamacare in 2010, to borrow from the American context), a prime minister is, therefore, more likely to reverse course than a president who is elected for a fixed term.

The genius of the Anglo-Canadian parliamentary system is the manner in which a prime minister is given the incentive to advance the national interest. A party leader who seeks support across the country must have the interest of the country as a whole in mind. If he concentrates government spending in one region only, he will lose support in other regions. That’s why strong a prime minister and a Parliament of nobodies better serves the country than the separation of powers and earmark-seeking Congressmen, like the late John Murtha of Pennsylvania (of the John Murtha Airport, John Murtha Center, etc.).

I’ll take Ruth Ellen Brosseau M.P. over Murtha any day. The comely member for Berthier-Maskinongé might not possess the legislative skills or ability to bring home the bacon, but a Parliament of Ruth Ellens more closely resembles the idealized assembly described by Edmund Burke in his Address to the Electors of Bristol, an assembly “of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide.”

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F.H. Buckley is a foundation professor at George Mason School of Law. His The American Illness, an edited volume, will be published by Yale U.P. in February 2013.

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